Empathy for Suffering Gets Lost in Battle : World War II: The bombing of Dresden and the devastation of Hiroshima have more in common than may be realized.

This is the year for grim anniversaries. It was 50 years ago that World War II was grinding through its last terrible months. Among the reminiscences of that period, both proud and melancholy, there has also been a resurgence of some of the controversies that that war produced. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington recently decided to abandon plans for an extensive exhibit of pictures and commentary on the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Even today, the moral and military justifications for that action arouses so much strong emotion and debate that the Smithsonian was persuaded simply to put the Enola Gay on exhibit.

As it happens, we are approaching yet another anniversary that, in its own way, partakes of some of the same controversy as that surrounding Hiroshima. On the night of Feb. 13, 1945, the British air force attacked the German city of Dresden in two waves of almost 800 aircraft. Around 2,700 tons of bombs were dropped, about 75% of them incendiaries. The next day, more than 400 Flying Fortresses from the American 8th Air Force continued the assault, and there was a third attack on Feb. 15 comprising about 200 bombers. The results were such that Dresden became a household word symbolizing the terror that could be inflicted on a city by a conventional bombing force.

Dresden burned for a week. The worst effects of the bombing came shortly after the initial British assault, when a tremendous firestorm of the sort seen previously only at Hamburg developed. About 1,600 acres, virtually the whole older part of Dresden, were engulfed by the flames. Estimates on casualties are still disputed, from a minimal guess of about 35,000 dead to the most drastic estimate of more than 200,000. In order to prevent the spread of disease, the authorities cordoned off the center of the city and constructed 25-foot-long grills where the victims’ remains were cremated en masse.

The catastrophic destruction of Dresden is regarded by many as perhaps the principle moral blot on Allied wartime operations. The city often had been called the Florence of Germany because of its famous artistic heritage. Dresden had no significant arms industry and indeed no particular military importance of any kind. Its military insignificance was what had kept Dresden relatively untouched by bombs for most of the war. The German authorities assumed that this immunity would continue and stripped the city of its air defenses for use elsewhere, and on the night of Feb. 13, not a single Luftwaffe plane rose to challenge the Allied bombers. Also important to consider is that the war was rapidly approaching its end. German resistance to the British and Americans in the West was crumbling; and the surrender came only 11 weeks later.

Why, then, was Dresden consigned to destruction? Defenders of the attack assembled a list of rationales. Among these were the need to destroy the railway yards in the city to assist the Russian forces advancing from the East. Another argument was that the bombing would create a flood of refugees out of the city and thus impede the transportation of German reinforcements to the Eastern Front. None of the reasons advanced for attacking Dresden stood up to close analysis, however. The marshalling yards, for example, lay on the outskirts of the city and were virtually untouched by the raid. The shaky justification for the attack was soon reflected in the eagerness of certain important figures to distance themselves from the event. Churchill was a notable example: He had been a major force behind the bombing of German cities, but after Dresden he went on record as deploring further indiscriminate attacks against German urban centers.

The melancholy but virtually inescapable conclusion is that Dresden was attacked simply because it was available to be attacked. There were few other relatively undamaged cities left in Germany at that point, and the Allies had thousands of bombers at their disposal that could hardly be left idle (or so those in authority seemed to feel). And at this stage of the war, Allied opinion was hardly predisposed to making any distinctions between the Nazi regime and the German people in general. Since the former was universally regarded as odious and responsible for all sorts of crimes, whatever calamities were visited on the latter were justified, perhaps even deserved, because of their complicity in the Nazi movement.

For all their differences, the destruction of Dresden and the devastation of Hiroshima bear a close resemblance. Both demonstrated that the human capacity for empathy with the suffering of others was among the chief casualties of that terrible war.